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1952

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A cafeteria on Times Square

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Migros asked its New York purchase office for some reference materials about the introduction of self-service restaurants. The photographer didn’t deliver what they were looking for, so an employee simply went and took some shots of self-service in action at «Hector’s Cafeteria».

Five years after the first Migros snack bar opens, those responsible start to think about a self-service restaurant. Emil Angst, a member of the governing board, asks for photos of such restaurants in the USA to be sent to the Migros purchasing office in New York. But the employee given this task, AK Strasser, has difficulty with it: “Please believe me that I have spent countless hours trying to obtain the photos for you,” he writes in May 1957. “They promise them to me, but I never receive anything; so is the American way.” Finally, after many “comings and goings”, he receives photos with “a busty black lady, in which the photographer has clearly concentrated on the lady and her shape rather than on the fittings of the cafeteria”.